Today was the last of the Instrument Flying Seminars. It was a pleasure to meet all of you, and to learn from your questions.

I have put the slides from today’s presentation up on the site, and I will gradually add text and links to the videos we saw today.

Please send me an email occasionally as you pass another milestone in your IFR adventure. Let me know if you encountered something unexpected in either the INRAT or the rest of your IFR course. You all are alumni of the first Seminar series. Your feedback will help me improve the presentations for the next time around.

Thank you for sitting through 67 slides and many subjects. Yesterday’s presentation covered more than I would like in three hours. But instrument flying is a big subject and I have to squeeze it into fifteen hours.

The good news is this: yesterday in class I mentioned I was having trouble migrating the website to SSL so we can communicate with it securely. I had managed to lock myself (and you) out of the site. Francois stayed for over an hour after class and diagnosed and fixed it for us. We now have access again. The migration to SSL is still not finished, but at least we can work with the site in the meantime.

Today I put the slides from yesterday’s seminar up on the site, under Instrument Flying Seminars/Procedures.

It was a pleasure to meet you all today for the first IFR Seminar: Airspace.

I just did my homework. Michael was right:

COMM FAILURE PROCEDURES are set out in the Canada Flight Supplement, page Emergency F 10 (near the back of the volume).

They can also be found in the AIM at RAC 6.3.2 (page 257 in the current edition).

I welcome your feedback. And as we discussed, if you send me your email I will make you an author on the site so you can post directly. I’ll send you a temporary password which you can change when you want. If you are new to WordPress, password change is here. To post, look at the WordPress Codex here.

I am about to start teaching flying again, and I recognize what a co-operative venture that is. Any teaching involves learning, and vice-versa. The classroom and the cockpit are venues where minds, styles, and experiences come together for the benefit of all.

From a practical point of view, there is a lot of material to be exchanged, modified, and discussed.

Why?

I have 19,000 hours of flying and 3500 hours of instruction. Many brave pilots who taught me have retired. Some have already passed on, taking their experience with them. The apprenticeship system that I enjoyed is in retreat. I am concerned that a lot of knowledge essential to aviation safety may get lost.

How?

A WordPress site can accept content from any number of users. The plan is to invite students to be Authors on the site, so they can post blogs on the aviation subjects – licences or ratings – they are working on or have completed.

Further on, we can incorporate the plug-in BuddyPress so the site becomes a specialized social network, allowing sub-groups, discussion, and private messages, à la FaceBook.

Even further out, perhaps a Wiki capability could be added, so that co-operatively the group could build and maintain a library of aviation-related knowledge.